I just read about this textbook from Rethinking Schools. It was published in 2002. This resource textbook teaches students 4th-12th grades social justice issues as an interconnected web. As the authors say in the introduction (which can be found online as well),

“For example, in the Huaorani Indian struggle in eastern Ecuador (depicted in the role play, “Oil, Rainforests, and Indigenous Cultures,” p. 268), the debt crisis forces the government to aggressively seek sources of cash – like oil – to make interest payments to international banks. Transnational oil companies take advantage of widespread poverty to pay starvation wages to workers in terribly unsafe conditions. And like a bull in a china shop, they maraud through fragile rainforest ecosystems. In the quest for profits, oil companies treat people and the environment simply as resources to exploit. But not only are rainforests being ravaged, the indigenous cultures that depend on those rainforests are also in danger of being wiped out.

If oil companies successfully sucked all the oil out of the Huaorani’s territory in Ecuador – perhaps as much as $2 billion worth – it would power cars in the United States for only 13 days. Thus, the more we taught about issues in the Third World, the more it brought us home – home to an epidemic of consumption that links us to the poverty of others around the world, and links us to the growing ecological crisis that threatens the very existence of life on earth.”

The book includes exercises that address math, science, reading comprehension and problem solving skills. I have not read this textbook (other than the example essays and lesson plans online), but plan on interlibrary loaning it. Is anyone else familiar with it?

Freire, a native of Brazil, is best known as a critic of what he called “the banking system” of education wherein students are viewed as a kind of vessel into which the teacher pours knowledge. He suggests instead a form of democratic education in which the student engages in active learning, bringing their whole self and skill set into the learning process. Horton, born in Tennessee, was the founder of the Highlander Folk School. At this school, Horton applied his belief that people working together can articulate and fight against injustice in the larger systems at work in our daily lives such as greed, racism, or social class. Highlander is perhaps best known for its work in the Civil Rights Movement where blacks and whites came together in the rural south to work toward equality.

Applications for Folklore Studies and Public Folklore:

Concept of the Talking Book
This book has a great many applications for public folklore theory and approach. For starters, the premise behind the book is highly applicable to ethnography. As mentioned above, the work is a “talking book” wherein the men sat down and recorded their conversations. Occasionally an unnamed “third party” (staff and students working at Highlander who sat in on the conversations) would ask a question or challenge an answer. Although the book was certainly edited for readability, this concept of a “talking book” could perhaps be something folklorists could use in the field as part of a more participatory approach to research in communities.

Folklore and Education
From a folklore and education approach, there is a wealth of information to be gleaned. Folklore and education programs typically stress the strength in bringing to the lesson plans a sense of the students’ personal history and community folkways. Both Horton and Freire have drawn upon this basic premise in their work with education and positive social change. For Horton, the solutions to problems begin in the minds of the people most directly experiencing these problems. Horton reminds the reader over and over again of the importance in speaking about ones experiences and the daily human conversation that can lead to great change. In speaking about his early years at Highlander he notes “When I couldn’t think of a good way to do something, I would involve the first person I saw in a conversation about it or get some people to talking about it because I found I could learn things from other people that up to that time I thought I had to work up myself” (46).

This kind of respect of the importance of a multitude of voices in working together for human rights is woven throughout the book. Although neither of these men consider themselves ethnographers nor engage in fieldworking in the strict sense, both men became advocates for human rights and a more democratic educational approach through a learning process that folklorists would call ethnography. In their work they focus on the “knowledge the students bring with them” and note that we understand the world not as a series of concepts, but as a series of personal events, cultural expressions, and interlocking webs of self and community. Through these we may also find ways to articulate our larger problems and work toward solutions.

Finally, I think this book is applicable to the fields of folklore and education in that the voices that come through are completely human. This is not a book about two men. This is a book about two men and their lives intertwined with other women and men. They discuss their mistakes, their dreams, the ideas upon which they agree and disagree, and how each man worked for positive social change within the cultural systems of which they are a part. Yet at the same time they do not glorify this idea of local culture, noting that sometimes in our folklore, or our culture, we produce just as many injustices as we do solutions. Horton points again to a kind of knowledge gained in interaction, conversation, and human interaction: “But I feel that all knowledge should be a trade-free zone. Your knowledge, my knowledge, everybody’s knowledge should be made use of. I think people who refuse to use other people’s knowledge are making a big mistake…because we need it all” (235).

For those working in educational systems, Freire’s comments are indispensable. I was most surprised to find out that the leader of democratic educational theory was once believed by his teachers to have learning problems, “leading his teachers to label him as having “mild mental retardation” (xix). This fact alone points to the importance of bringing to educational practice the students’ personal life. Freire stresses the importance of becoming an educator that is willing to learn alongside students, challenge students, and never compartmentalize knowledge, suggesting that all knowledge systems can and should work together. Once again I am reminded of educational systems such as the Alaska Native Knowledge Network or even Louisiana Voices wherein lessons are learned as holistic and related to daily life rather than compartmentalizes unrelated chunks of knowledge.

Both Freire and Horton are radicals. They don’t intend to push limited reforms but rather speak out against larger systems such as capitalism, bureaucratized education, poverty, and social class. Reading this book will challenge you and remind you that the greatest radicals are still, in the end, just humans. This book exemplifies their humanity and brings to light the role of ethnography in working toward positive social change.